Why People Don’t Understand How To Use Your Software
*… despite the diligent effort of your UX and Product teams, and what you can do about it.*
The Creator’s Curse
You’ve invested a ton of effort, time, care, and thought into your new software product. You live and breathe, sleep, and wake up with it. You’ve been so thoughtful and caring about your future users, and you’ve performed to the best of your ability (that’s the bottomline, as you’ll see later in the post). You’ve passionately instilled life, creative sparkles, baby unicorns, and what not into the product. But, for some annoying reason, when you’re finally ready to show the beta to your prospects, holding your breath, the sobering response that you get from them is this one: “It’s too complicated. I don’t understand how to use your software”. Sounds familiar?
In this post I will explore possible reasons for such an outcome, offering a few practical strategies that might help to get a favourable first feedback from the users.
Why, Oh Why… ? The Blurred Vision
We honestly believe that UX designers are supposed to take the all-inclusive care of how people experience a software product/a web app. What we forget about is this:
When immersed into a project or an initiative for quite a long time, people blur their sharp edge and their ability to look into what they create with the fresh eyes.
I’ve written on that before in the post called Soap, Laundry and Company Boards. Even with the mix of people from relatively diverse backgrounds in the product design team, if they work on one and the same thing for too long, they lose their freshness of perception which is a vital prerequisite for the quality UX design work and for product management. And, unlike with laundry, you can’t make people and teams “get clean” by rinsing them with instant detergents. The acquired blurriness of perception is inevitable, and it comes as a natural consequence of having the brain focused on one and the same task for too long. Just like with the physical eyesight. If you stare at one spot long enough, you‘d notice how your vision blurs. Or, there’s too much “soap foam” if you rub the laundry against the washboard for too long. Either way, you lose the freshness and clarity of perception. Your vision is blurred.
What makes this “soapiness” even more disorienting, the product dev guys quite often forget that what they do, the software, is not as precious as a commodity. It’s not gold, platinum, or silver. While a piece of a software might have been created with passion and inspiration, and as an insider you know the true value of what you’ve invested into it, it’s hardly possible for non-softdev people to appreciate a piece of software the same way they instantly appreciate the other traditional creative pieces, such as a good music, a good story, a film, or a piece of art. Most “profanes” treat apps as tools that help them do what they need to do faster and with more comfort, and that’s that.
But the blurred vision of inspired product creators keeps playing tricks on them. It keeps telling them that this product screen is very intuitive, and there’s no need for verbal messages whatsoever to explain to people what and how needs to be done here. Or, it tells them that a sophisticated report or a use case, that‘d only be clear to advanced users, is something that any dummy would grab and use, and jump for joy. Not at all. Those biased judgments are costly, as it’s all about time. What if the precious time goes into developing a feature that is rarely used? Or not used at all? Or, what if the lack of just one little thing, one small tooltip, or a quick verbal instruction, or an unclear error message would discourage prospective users from looking into the app/product further, no matter how many treasures are hidden inside? The neglected smooth start is the top reason why prospects silently leave, and might never be coming back.
I’ve mentioned just a few consequences of this blurred vision. If you can’t get a bypass, then which strategies could be used to tackle the blurriness?
UX+Marketing+QA+Developers. Rinse, Mix and Repeat.
First, you need to employ anyone within your reach, just like a toddler plays with anything they can get a hold of in the sandbox. This strategy, even for a toddler, would be less costly and less troublesome than begging with the Mom to buy more shovels, buckets, or — even worse — gadgets. There are people in your company, who are not directly involved with the production, and whose daily job is to communicate with the leads and customers: the customer support. Those folks deserve not only an extra glass of kefir, but rather a monument for what they do, as they are the 911 saviors for any careless “it’s intuitive” assumption of the production team. Ask them first. Or, people in marketing, or in account management — just anyone who’s had enough interactions with the clients/leads/prospects. The marketing/sales folks here would come across as carriers of customers’ perception, and they‘d be delighted to share their feelings about a new interface, or a new product, or a new feature. This strategy is less costly, less risky, and less time-taking than dumping a raw product or feature on the leads, hoping that they‘d be generous enough to even care to communicate their feedback.
You might ask: why not involve the people who interact with the customers somewhat earlier in the stage of UX designing? If these people step in earlier, we‘d be able to come up with the intuitive interface right away..! With no extra rounds of fixing..! Not so fast. There’s a little catch 22 here. Don’t forget about the soap. If the “virgin” marketing/support/sales specialist folks get soaked in the swamps of UX design modeling, they‘d inevitably lose the freshness they need for the job. And they‘d become just as “bubbly” in their perception as the original UX team.
The solution might be to rotate those internal feedback-givers. There’s no universal recipe as to when or how frequently; it’s about the feeling that people get, and the edge of freshness, and for how long they can keep it. Besides, there’s another consideration. If the customer-exposed folks spend too much of their time on the UX design, they‘d have less time to do their primary job well. Considering these two facts (loss of freshness + more time spent on the UX input at the expense of the primary job responsibilities), it would make more sense to engage the marketing/sales people as the first-tier internal clients, and not as the early stage UX appraisers.
Also, it might help if your product/app gets some scrutiny from third-party evangelists who are ready to provide their meaningful feedback by doing simple usability tests.
Another helpful practice would be to “unsoap” however possible. By “unsoaping”, I mean taking a distraction from work and looking for freshness and inspiration not in-screen, but off-screen. Using anything to get rid of the “blurriness” that distorts the perception. “Unsoaping” is too wide a subject, and it requires a deeper look into human cognition (I tapped on that in the post on cognitive endurance basics).
The opposite extreme is to trust your marketing team completely with the design. That’s what happened to Apple with their notorious iOS7 icons, back in the day. They had it the other way round: their marketing and communications team came up with the designs, and the design team only tweaked the icons. The Apple fans were shocked with the results.
UX Design: a Thing-in-Itself? Hmm..
Some Product Owners or UX designers might ask: why should I trust these people more than myself? I’ve been a UX designer or a product owner for so many years, I know things better than them. The reason is, when you’re in a small start-up, you’re a different person. To make an analogy with the indie film making, you’re the director, the cameraman, the post-production crew — everything. Later on, as your company grows, the growth has its flip side. You lose touch with reality if you stop communicating with the leads and clients. You’re not focusing on their complete experience, locking yourself out in just one role as a UX designer or a product owner. As a side note, this is the same sad story that happened to the scientific knowledge as it got more specialized.
Imagine there’s a physician who specializes only on headaches. But a headache can stem from lots of sources, and only a few of them are sitting right in the head. All the rest is the merged impact of many influences coming from the other parts of the body. Just a very simplistic example. The people who liaison with clients (or who have spent years, liaising with them, or who are otherwise fit to be your “unbiased” looking glass), they are the first to talk to, if/when you catch yourself focusing on UX design as a thing-in-itself (and if your company is not a small start-up any longer).
On one hand, it’s very good that the whole UX team can meticulously craft their graphic designs now, as the company got bigger. But, on the other hand, the designers might have their head in the clouds as they forget that software is not about enjoying a tiny 1000th shade of grey. Well, of course, you can prefer to have the design all “licked out”, if that’s your priority, but if your priority is making a software that is usable to people vs. a software with a touch of a very specific genius that is understandable to only so many of your users, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. The universal principle of “just enough” has its payables.
If you’re overdoing with one aspect, then there’s a loss on the other side of the scales, and a slick graphic design with the neglected user experience, in its fullest sense, will leave people saying: “Wow, what a great design, but it’s an overkill, it’s too much. I can’t figure out how to use it”. It’s the same as with a barbell. If you pull and push just one side too hard, the barbell will send an instant response, having you collapse on the floor, disproportionately and inharmoniously.
The Summary
I’ve outlined some practices to minimize the impact of the blurred vision, so the software product that you deliver to people makes them happy because they know how to do what they need to do with it. Somehow, even toddlers manage to buy cars with smartphones :) Resort to your marketing, account managers, or support specialists, etc. Anyone in your company who has better chances to predict the reactions of customers simply because they’ve had many more interactions with them than the production team did. They say, you are who you communicate with. So, the marketing/sales/customer care teams represent a “portable” projection of customers in your company, and it’s up to you whether to tap on their unique input or not. At the same time, remember to mix and alternate those “appraisers”. If marketeers are involved in the UX design for too long, they inevitably lose their freshness as well. And remember to “unsoap” the UX designers and the dev team.
There’s another more complicated practice, and it’s not exactly about user experience. This practice is rather aimed at handling the tyranny of the creator’s choice, and it’s about building quantitative models to calculate which feature is the one that your product really needs right now. In this case, a model is responsible for the choices, not people. But that’s a totally different subject (and maybe I’ll write on that some other time).
Stay tuned. In another post I will share some tips/ideas to help people quickly learn how to use your software app, even if they can’t figure it out right away.
Related:
Why People Are Reluctant To Upgrade
Featuritis and Vulnerable Visions
UX: Why User Vision Design Matters
This story is based on an earlier article.
